Conventional barcodes have enabled items, such as goods for sale or mail within a mail system, to be marked and later identified by a suitable barcode reader. These barcodes may be printed in newspapers, magazines, on signs, buses, business cards, embedded in content of web pages, displayed on monitors, and on just about any other print or display that a user might desire.
In addition, it is increasingly becoming an established practice to use barcodes to move content from the Internet to camera-equipped mobile phones and vice versa. In these instances, barcodes are scanned or “imaged” by a barcode reader and then used as a basis for uploading and downloading content and services over the Internet. For instance, a music store may display a monitor having an embedded symbol (or sequence of symbol portions) corresponding to a music track, the name of a song, and an artist. In this example, a camera-equipped mobile phone may “image” the barcode and then use the barcode as a basis to download the music track, the name of the song, and the artist. In this regard, a barcode reader is operating as a high-level application. Conventional barcode readers, however, are often capable of recognizing a limited set of barcode types and are thus unable to obtain content related to barcodes that the conventional barcode readers have not been programmed to recognize.
It would therefore be beneficial to provide a system that enables recognition of a large variety of barcodes.